U.S. Sinks Plastics Treaty

News about environmental damage is often hard to read, but some stories stand out as especially tragic for what they portend for world ecosystems. One such story comes from Lord Howe Island, a United Nations Heritage site of volcanic beauty 360 miles off Australia’s east coast. Here, ecologists have found shocking concentrations of plastics—up to two ounces, or 20 percent of body weight—in the bodies of sable shearwater chicks. The birds’ mothers mistake the plastic for food due to the chemicals it emits. The mosaic above shows plastics ingested by one chick, including a plastic fork and a blue bottle cap. (Jennifer Lavers/Adrift Lab). Alex Bond, curator of Britain’s Natural History Museum, was quoted in the Washington Post (May 16, 2025, Victoria Craw) saying that the findings serve as a “canary in the coal mine” for the global environment.

Debate in Geneva, Switzerland, in August ’25 at the plastic treaty talks centered on two alternative remedies: limiting plastics production and waste management. Most countries favored production limits as the most effective approach. “We cannot mop the floor while the pipe is gushing.” Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s lead negotiator, told other countries. However, the U.S. aligned with oil-producing countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and Russia, who want to maintain plastics industry production as a major consumer of fossil fuels.

The U.S. State Department cited nearly one million American workers employed in plastics and related industries. However, protection of jobs has long been a flawed rationale for avoiding environmental protection. It fails to recognize that environmental quality has value to people just as do consumer goods. The key difference is that businesses do not account for environmental impacts in their pricing, resulting in what is known as ‘the tragedy of the commons.’ Only government can protect the environment, as it has done with the ozone layer, the ban on DDT, and cleanup of hazardous waste and water and air pollution. None of these successes could have been achieved if the criterion was that no jobs could be affected in any way. In fact, eco-friendly industries create jobs, and constant job changes are part of the inherent process of ‘creative destruction’ that keeps economies vibrant. Just as traditional industries make way for new ones, the economy can adjust to the changes needed to reap the benefits of ecosystem preservation and improvement. People live within ecosystems, not outside them.

By sinking the plastics treaty, the U.S. has ensured that the large-scale, harmful infiltration of plastics into life across the planet—not just birds, animals, and marine life but microplastics in human bodies—will continue unabated.

Improved waste management is more a talking point than a viable solution to plastics pollution. It could be successful, but only with increased public investment (again, the free market cannot reduce pollution with government initiatives). Measures such as taxes on plastic bags are helpful, but much more is needed. It’s clear that the current U.S. federal government is not prepared to commit the funding that would be necessary to make the waste management approach that it advocated in Geneva a success.

What should citizens do given the lack of government action? First, we need to recognize that plastics recycling efforts have failed, according to Eve Schaub, author of “Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman’s Trashy Journey to Zero Waste.” She notes that only about 5% of plastic is recycled compared to 68% for paper and cardboard. Plastic recycling is energy intensive and toxic, and a lot of new plastic (70%) is needed to hold the newly formed plastic item together. If all of this isn’t bad enough, recycled plastic contains a toxic mix of “non-intentionally added substances” with harmful or unknown effects on human health.

Schaub’s conclusion is that all plastic waste is best sent to the landfill, not recycled. This recommendation, shared by others who have studied plastic recycling, will result in less plastic in rivers, oceans, and our bodies—and out of the bellies of baby birds.

I hope you enjoyed these reflections on plastics in the environment. I’d be delighted to receive your thoughts. You can send a message through the contact form on this site, and I’ll reply.